Missouri, Kansas City Offer Court Opposing Desegregation Plans

The state of Missouri and the Kansas City school board have offered
a federal district judge drastically different proposals for the
desegregation of the predominantly black central-city school
district.

In papers filed with the court on Jan. 17, the city school board
proposed that its schools be consolidated with those in 11
predominantly white suburban school districts. Countering the
nationwide trend toward the adoption of voluntary desegregation
techniques, the plan anticipates the mandatory reassignment of a
significant percentage of students in the newly constituted
118,000-student district, according to a board member.

Proposal Rejected

The state, on the other hand, rejected the consolidation proposal as
"overly broad" and offered a plan restricted to the city schools only.
It features minimal mandatory student reassignment and a variety of
educational improvements in schools that are now 90-percent black.

According to officials involved in the dispute, U.S. District Judge
Russell Clark is expected to schedule hearings on the two opposing
plans within the month. He may then choose one plan over the other, or
he could order both sides back to the drawing board, they
suggested.

The plans filed by the state and the school board were ordered by
Judge Clark last September after he found both liable for segregation
in the Kansas City district, which comprises only the central part of
the city. In April 1984, he dismissed charges against the 11 suburban
districts, ruling that the black plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit had
failed to show that the districts had acted in a manner that
contributed to student segregation in the city. The case is Jenkins v.
Missouri. (See Education Week, April 11 and Sept. 26, 1984.)

The city district enrolls 36,000 students, of whom 68 percent are
black. Twenty-four of the district's 68 schools have black enrollments
at or above 90 percent. Minority enrollment in the suburban districts,
which enroll a total of 82,000 students, averages about 7 percent,
ranging from almost 20 percent in Hickman Hills to just over 2 percent
in Lee's Summit.

Details of Plans

Under the city school board's plan, scheduled to go into effect with
the 1986-87 school year, minority enrollment in all schools in the
consolidated district would range from 20 percent to 40 percent. The
district would be subdivided into three regions, each containing a
section of the existing city district, and would be governed by a
single school board and administered by a single superintendent.

All costs of desegregation, as ordered by Judge Clark, would be
borne by the state. According to James Borthwick, the city board's
lawyer, in the upcoming school year the state would be required to
provide $4 million for planning, $25 million to bring city school
buildings up to code, and $31 million for the improvement of
educational programs in the city.

Unlike the city board's plan, the state's proposal focuses almost
exclusively on schools in the city that have black enrollments
exceeding 90 percent, said Bruce Farmer, an assistant state attorney
general.

Under the plan, he said, attendance zones would be redrawn to reduce
black enrollments in those schools to within 10 percentage points of 72
percent. The plan also proposes various educational improvements, such
as early-childhood and extended-year programs, in the predominantly
black schools.

Sharp Differences

State and city officials have sharply criticized each other's
proposals--the state attorney general calling the city plan "a raid on
the treasury" and the city school board president calling the state
plan ''a fairy tale."

"We think the city's plan is much too broad in that it goes beyond
the scope of Judge Clark's order by bringing in the suburbs," said Mr.
Farmer. He added that the Kansas City board failed to take into account
the judge's order to pay particular attention to cost factors in
fashioning a plan.

But according to Sue Fulson, ael5lmember of the Kansas City board,
city school officials adopted the metropolitan desegregation plan in
spite of Judge Clark's dismissal of the suburban defendants in the case
because it offered the only "realistic" hope for ending segregation in
the city.

"The crux of the issue is how you define desegregation," Ms. Fulson
said in an interview last week. "The state wants to bus black kids in
schools that are now 90-percent black to schools that are 82-percent
black. That's not much in anyone's book."

"Our position is that the judge found that the effects of
state-mandated segregation continue to exist throughout the
metropolitan area, and thus a metropolitan remedy is justified," added
Mr. Borthwick. "Secondly, the judge determined that the state is the
primary constitutional wrongdoer in this case, and therefore has the
duty to take whatever steps are necessary to remedy the wrong, even if
it involves redrawing school-district boundary lines."

On the question of costs, Mr. Borthwick added; "The plan will be
expensive, but the state never performed its duty to desegregate and
it's about time for it to begin."

Alternative to Busing

In a related development, a report published this month by a
public-policy research group in Washington suggests there is
"compelling evidence that desegregation works well if it is done
well."

However, the group's report notes, civil-rights advocates should
consider "high-quality black-dominated schools as an attractive
alter-native" to mandatory busing.

"If demographics make it impossible materially to reduce racial
isolation, or if--more controversially--desegregation will not move
beyond merely reducing racial isolation at the school level, then
quality education is a plausible alternative," writes Jennifer
Hochschild, assistant professor of politics and public policy at
Princeton University, in Thirty Years After Brown, a report issued by
the Joint Center for Political Studies.

Strategies Critiqued

According to Ms. Hochschild, "powerful and widespread black
support'' for such schools "is a strong argument in their favor." She
adds, however, that black-dominated schools present the risk of
isolating black children from a white-dominated world, and that "since
whites tend to control resources, black schools are in grave danger of
being shortchanged." Nevertheless, she concludes that a move to
black-dominated schools is "risky but not unacceptable."

The "worst possible strategy for achieving successful
desegregation'' is that promoted by the Reagan Administration, Ms.
Hochschild also argues.

First, by seeking to rescind successful, publicly accepted mandatory
desegregation plans, the Administration causes opposition to
desegregation to "skyrocket," she suggests. Second, by folding the
Emergency School Aid Act into the federal education block-grants
program in 1981, the Administration effectively abolished "the only
federal program to aid voluntary, quality desegregation."

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